Search Results

“... American plains does not exactly put one into the mainstream of American letters. But the pun in Morris’s title is profoundly right: there is, after all, a ‘mainstream’ more enduring than fashions, and this plainsong laments and celebrates lives which in their frequent losses and occasional joys are far less provincial – well, than whatever novel is ...”

“... In The Morris Book (1907), a work that did much to foster the 20th-century revival of interest in English folk dancing, Cecil Sharp both acknowledges and attempts to repress the hybrid, extra-national origins of the morris dance: The weight of the testimony must be held to show Morocco as the fount and origin, no matter if the genius of our own folk – so far removed from anything native to Africa – has, in the process of the centuries, altered it until it bears, in spirit, little resemblance to the parent stock ...”

“... Here are two books about the relationship of the English to their past. According to Patrick Wright, England is a reactionary society burdened by a false mystique of national identity. To dissolve that mystique must be one of the first priorities of democratic socialists in establishing an alternative society with a renewed faith in its capacity for progress ...”

“... the operation. Eventually de Menil’s family intervened, Friedrich resigned in 1985 and Charles Wright, a young lawyer from Seattle, was hired as director. Wright continued the focus on single-artist projects and long-term exhibitions, but he also opened Dia to the art community through new shows, adventurous symposia and ...”

“... an academic collaboration with the geographer Doreen Massey and the cultural historian Patrick Wright – and it’s altogether more sober, less playfully immersed in the faintly mad worldview of Robinson, who has anyway vanished, presumed dead. But he has left behind his notes and the footage from which the film has notionally been constructed. Robinson ...”

“... hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s ‘rank growth’. Dickens was true neither to life nor to his age. He was a cartoonist rather than a documentarist – not that the veracity of documentarists is to be trusted ...”

“... which the opera singer Jenny Lind made wildly popular. Ten years later the great antiquary Thomas Wright published his History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages. Reissued in 1871 as The Homes of Other Days, it contained more than three hundred illustrations drawn from medieval manuscripts by the brilliant engraver ...”

“... British heritage industry is a loathsome collection of theme parks and dead values.’ For Patrick Wright, it is ‘part of the self-fulfilling culture of national decline’. As their country’s importance in the world diminishes, the British turn to their past for emotional compensation. How long, asks Robert Hewison, will it be before the whole country is ...”

“... and social ideals to their personal lives. The misadventures of Schreiner and Ellis, of May Morris and of Dolly Maitland, though very much in the background, provide a context within which we can better understand Eleanor’s tragedy. The novel begins with the inquest that follows her suicide in the spring of 1898. It then goes back to trace the ...”

“... during the Boer War. Influenced by the very Englishly expressed Victorian socialism of William Morris, H.M. Hyndman and Robert Blatchford, the cause had been taken up and redirected by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc in the first decade of the 20th century. It had been resumed in the 1920s by various other figures, including H.J. Massingham, a former ...”

“... of wings. Eighty-two years later, two bicycle mechanics in Dayton, Ohio – Wilbur and Orville Wright – attached a wing to a bicycle, raced it through a wind tunnel, measuring the lift and drag, and proved that a mechanical Pegasus was not fundamentally implausible. However, it would take a very optimistic view of human endeavour to see the Velocimano as ...”

“... the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), the National Trust, William Morris’s old Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and elsewhere, with the old ‘Amenity Brigade’, as he was to call it. There can hardly have been a conservation or planning society in his lifetime in which he was not active, if not among the ...”

“... the cottage I had thought but a sizeable house with an extensive garden tended largely by Helena Wright, the pioneer of birth control with whom he shared the house, who was often knelt there working, planting out the beds, with her radio (a source of irritation to Bruce) always beside her. Brudenell House at Quainton, to which he subsequently moved, was more ...”

“... it was (English) national rather than merely metropolitan – imbued with the spirit of William Morris, enthusiastic for the new idea of a decentralising, anti-statist, bottom-up Guild Socialism. Ironically, various New Age luminaries, notably G.D.H. Cole, became some of the Statesman’s most prolific and influential contributors. Indeed the New Age, with ...”

“... of video games, of course it’s very much in question – it would be like having a genius morris dancer. Suffice it to say that in the video-game world, including the many tens of millions of people who play his games, he’s an unquestioned genius.) Miyamoto has, throughout his career, engaged with the question of arbitrariness by making his games ...”